The Third Walpurgis Night

Now available in English for the first time, this book was written in immediate response to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 but withheld from publication for fear of reprisals against Jews trapped in Germany. Acclaimed when finally published by Kösel Verlag in 1952, it is a devastatingly prescient exposure, giving special attention to the regime's corruption of language as masterminded by Joseph Goebbels. Bertolt Brecht wrote to the author that, in his indictment of Nazism, “You have disclosed the atrocities of intonation and created an ethics of language.” This masterful translation aims for clarity where the author had good reason to be cautious and obscure.